Ionic Liquid-Mediated Recovery of Carotenoids from the Bactris gasipaes Fruit Waste and Their Application in Food-Packaging Chitosan Films

Abstract

In this work, a process for the extraction and purification of carotenoids from the fruit Bactris gasipaes was developed. Ethanolic and aqueous solutions of ionic liquids (ILs) and surfactants were evaluated on the extraction of these pigments. Thus, we developed an optimized sustainable downstream process mediated by the best solvent with further isolation of the carotenoids and the recyclability of the IL used. The process was characterized not only in terms of efficiency but also regarding its environmental impact. The recyclability of the solvents as well as the high efficiency (maximum yield of extraction of carotenoids = 88.7 ± 0.9 μgcarotenoids·gdried biomass –1) and the low environmental impact of the integrated process developed in this work were demonstrated. In the end, in order to incorporate functional activity for an alternative food-packaging material, carotenoids were successfully applied on the preparation of chitosan-based films with excellent results regarding their mechanical parameters and antioxidant activity.

Insights on the use of alternative solvents and technologies to recover bio‐based food pigments

“…Due to the high hydrophobicity of the carotenoids and chlorophylls, nonionic surfactant‐based solutions (as Tween ® , Tomadol ® , Triton ® , and Pluronic families) have demonstrated promising advantages considering their use in aqueous solution, thus reducing the environmental impact of the overall process, because hydrophobic pigments, such as carotenoids and chlorophylls, are usually extracted by COS (Leite et al., 2017; Vieira et al., 2018). Some recent works have used surfactant‐based and tensioactive‐IL aqueous solutions as solvents to obtain carotenoids and chlorophylls from food matrices (de Souza Mesquita, Martins, et al., 2020; Vieira & Ventura, 2019; Vieira et al., 2018). In these works, efficient and more selective processes were developed allowing to obtain twice as much in the yield of extraction of carotenoids, when compared with the organic solvents‐mediated extractions.…”

“…Thus, there are new possible technologies able to be applied to food, nutraceutical, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical products, without requiring an additional polishing step. For example, by applying carotenoids obtained from Bactris gasipaes fruits waste, it was developed a chitosan‐based film as a possible alternative food‐packaging materials using carotenoids extracted by aqueous solutions of tensioactive ammonium IL, 1‐decyl‐trimethylammonium bromide ([N 1,1,1,10 ]Br), with excellent results regarding their physical and mechanical parameters, as well as high antioxidant activity (de Souza Mesquita, Martins, et al., 2020). Additionally, it was concluded that besides the higher performance of the alterative process compared to COS, the physical–chemical and mechanical parameters of the films loaded with carotenoids extracted by IL were significantly better.…”

“…Other strategies to isolate pigments from the alternative solvents were also described in the literature. As examples are the use of thermal precipitation (de Souza Mesquita, Ventura, et al., 2019), adsorbent columns in solid‐phase extractions (SPE) (Murador, Braga, et al., 2019), antisolvents (de Souza Mesquita, Martins, et al., 2020), and back‐extraction (Ruiz et al., 2020). In a recent work, de Souza Mesquita, Ventura, et al.…”

“…Later, the same authors have developed a new integrated process using aqueous solutions of an ammonium‐based IL, the 1‐decyltetramethylammonium bromide, [N 1,1,1,10 ]Br. Again, the polishing step was carried, however, and due to the nature of carotenoids and the IL solution, water was applied as antisolvent in a very efficient way (allowing to recycle around 96% of [N 1,1,1,10 ]Br), which was recycled up to three cycles, allowing to obtain pure carotenoids (99.9%) in the end (de Souza Mesquita, Martins, et al., 2020).…”

Chitosan‐based biomaterials: From discovery to food application

“…Therefore, when these combined technologies and research results were applied to chitosan food packaging materials, it was found that the application range of chitosan films could be extended (Table 2). 103‐108 …”